


In A Kingdom By The Sea

by ivorygates



Series: Across Five Aprils [1]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Daniverse, Gen, Girl!Daniel, Implied Potential Noncon That Doesn't Happen, Implied Potential Underage Noncon That Doesn't Happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-21
Updated: 2006-06-21
Packaged: 2017-11-25 14:11:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/639687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea..."</em><br/>                                                                                   --Edgar Allen Poe, <em>Annabel Lee</em></p>
<p>Danielle Jackson was younger once.  But she was never a child.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In A Kingdom By The Sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [K_Kijo](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=K_Kijo).



She's sixteen. She's in California. She's _free._

She's going to college.

University of California at Los Angeles. The campus is in Westwood, 400 acres of what is pretty much downtown Los Angeles. And there have been times over the last two years that she never thought she'd get here. Not that _here_ was where she meant to get, but this is away, as far from New York as she can get. It has an excellent Linguistics program. And she has a scholarship. She's going to need it.

The year is 1980 and Danielle Jackson is completely alone in the world.

#

  
  
The last year and a half has been an education in all the ways your life can go wrong after you hit bottom.

She'd thought it happened when she was eight, and her parents died. There are times when the sounds and smells of that moment wrench her up out of a sound sleep, even today. But Nick had come to the funeral. He said he was her grandfather, and that she could come with him if she didn't cry. She promised she wouldn't cry, and he took her away.

She thought the worst thing came four years later when the police come to her hotel room in New York. Nick is in the hospital; that was why they'd come back to the States. They take her to Juvenile Hall. They let her visit him once in the hospital, and he says she isn't to worry, he'll take care of everything. She'd been sure he meant he was going to get her out of there, but two weeks later they tell her he's left the country. While he was in the hospital he's signed a paper giving up his rights to her. She can be adopted if anyone wants to, though the caseworker that she sees tells her that probably nobody will. She's too old.

Two months later she's placed with a family in southern Westchester County. The Wilkersons explain to her that they feel its time to give something back to the community. They decorate a bedroom for her, asking her what her favorite colors are, and choosing their own when she doesn't answer. They buy her a bicycle, and a television for her room, and closets full of clothes. The only thing that they buy her that she actually wants is her first pair of glasses; images are sharp for the first time in longer than she can remember and it's easy to read again, though she doesn't read the books they buy for her, just as she doesn't watch the television, or ride the bicycle, or chatter enthusiastically about her schooldays, or go out for a wide variety of after-school enrichment programs. Nor does she call the Wilkersons 'Mother' and 'Father' -- as they wish her to -- or talk to them about Nick or her parents or her past.

They wait for her to for quite a long time. They even send her to a psychologist to find out why she doesn't. She and he talk -- in German -- about recent archaeological finds in urban Cairo; she's interested in the subject, and apparently he's willing to talk about anything she is. They don't discuss her personal life at all for any of the three sessions she attends before the Wilkersons stop sending her to him. She's sorry to stop going. She enjoyed talking to him.

In the end, the Wilkersons send her back to the State. They tell her the night before the caseworker is supposed to come and pick her up that they think she'll be happier somewhere else. She leaves with different things than she came with -- she's grown a bit in the last two years -- and the suitcase is new, a farewell gift. There isn't much left by this point from when she was with Nick. A few pictures. A book or two. Her parents' things are in storage, waiting for the day she can claim them. The rest has been lost or stolen along the way. She's learned to travel light.

She spends six months with the State of New York this time, and that's bad enough. Custodial Care is like prison, and that isn't fair. All you have to do to end up in Custodial Care is be unwanted. Most of the other kids her age -- fourteen -- have criminal records. She doesn't. All she did wrong was to not die. And something else wrong too, because Nick dumped her. And then the Wilkersons changed their minds, so she must have done something wrong again. She was never sure what they wanted from her, anyway. She wasn't their daughter and saw no reason to pretend she was.

Then the Gutierrezes take her. And though it takes her almost three months to realize it, she discovers that there is something worse than being abandoned in every way possible.

They're a Cuban immigrant family. They own a store, a _bodega,_ in Spanish Harlem. They have eight children of their own -- another on the way -- and are fostering six more; all older children like her. She knows the deal by now. The Gutierrezes are getting paid by the State to take in cheap labor. It's not quite a scam.

The living conditions are better than Custodial Care, not as good as at the Wilkersons'.

She hears a great deal about God and 'a woman's place' in her new placement. The Gutierrezes take all their family, real and manufactured, to Mass every Sunday. They're good Catholics, and so are their children. The rest of them are good at keeping their mouths shut, though Lamotte says (privately) that he's going to Hell for being in a Catholic church. He's joking, though. Lamotte doesn't believe in God any more, although he still believes in Hell. All the State kids do. Even Dani does -- they call her _'Daniellita'_ here; fortunately her Spanish is excellent and she picks up the new dialect quickly -- and she knows she's had it easier than the rest of them.

Until now. Maybe even now. Nobody's beating her, raping her, cutting her, starving her. They're just ignoring her. Ignoring her without leaving her alone.

She wonders if there can be Hell without Heaven. She's certain there's no God. Not the Christian one, anyway. Her parents were Egyptologists; she knows Yahweh is just an evolution of the Middle Eastern creator-gods worshipped in the desert for thousands of years. Ra, Ba'al, Rimon, Jehovah. They're all the same. All equally real.

#

She insists on continuing to go to school, though the New York Public Schools are a joke, because she needs her High School diploma to get into college: she made up her mind years ago that she was going to study archaeology. Like Nick. Like her parents.

There are still some teachers in the system who care, and she finds them. Getting to and from school -- and through her school day -- takes all the survival skills she learned growing up in the Mideast and Central America -- she's too white and too female to be where she is. It isn't easy. And there aren't enough hours in the day: she needs to study and work in the store as well. There are rules in the Gutierrez household.

She already knows the Gutierrezes don't care about her future or whether or not she does well in school. Only about keeping her until she's eighteen, and the monthly payments they get for her. It gets infinitely worse when they find out she has money.

Trust funds from her parents. Insurance settlements from the museum. All coming to her when she's eighteen. Her caseworker -- Ms. Keeler is the current one -- has talked to her about them. In her mind, Dani's set it all aside for college. None of it does her any good now, anyway: she can't touch it and neither can her foster family.

The Wilkersons didn't care about the money, so she assumed nobody would. But when the Gutierrezes find out that she's 'rich,' everything changes. Suddenly they have a plan for her future. She'll marry Julio, their eldest boy; he's eighteen. That will make her a part of their family. She can marry him -- and quit school -- when she's sixteen. It's legal if they sign the papers. And they say they have the right to do that.

Married, she'll be a legal adult. Her money will come to her and to her new husband's family. And they will keep her forever. She can have babies, they tell her. God wants that. They know what God wants, and what they want. They don't care what she wants. They don't really see _her_ at all.

She doesn't say 'yes' and she doesn't say 'no.' But they're sure it's 'yes,' because they've pushed, and she didn't push back. Her father always used to quote Kipling about the folly of hustling the East, telling her (a child of six) that it was important to choose the battles that mattered; she'd internalized the lesson years before she'd understood he was talking about dealing with the decadent oriental bureaucracies of the Near East. Her father has been dead for seven years now, and the battle she faces is a battle that matters, but she must choose when to fight it.

Someday, years from now, she will meet another man, a military man, who will quote Kipling to her on quite another topic, and she will fall in love without even noticing.

The Gutierrezes could do worse to her to make her agree to go along with their plans than endless explanations of why they're right to do what they're doing. It takes her years of retrospection to realize that. At the time she only feels terror for what she's about to lose, and in her mind they become the enemy. There's never been an enemy in her life before. She feels it changing her in ways she doesn't like.

The rest of the State kids find out about the Gutierrezes' plan for her future because she gets moved into a bedroom with Julio's sister Maria. The tenuous friendships she's made -- more alliances, really, but necessary to survival -- dissolve overnight.

Maria hates the new arrangement. So does Dani. But the food she's getting now is better. And the family buys her new clothes. Pretty pink dresses, new sneakers and jeans. For the rest of her life she will hate the color pink, though later she won't quite remember why.

Bribes. She takes them because she's lying by implication. Tacit acquiescence.

She has to escape. From the Gutierrezes. From the system. Hatred and contempt and fear -- things she will be ashamed of later, the fear most of all -- make her ruthless.

It takes her almost a full year to plan and execute her escape. For all that time she lives a double life, trusting no one, guarding every word she says. Eventually she will re-learn the habit of trust, but along the way she will have lost the ability to talk about herself and her own life, and it will never occur to her to wonder about that at all.

She knows what she needs to get away. Nick taught her to research and to plan. She needs a place in the world, and that means a GED and a Petition for Emancipated Minor Status, and for a college to accept her _now._ But she needs the GED first, then her SATs and GREs. There are college application deadlines; she can't afford to miss any of them because she can't wait an extra year; her birthday is July 8th, and if she isn't free by July 8th, 1980, she'll be married.

Trapped.

Lost.

Her foster parents' signatures are simple to forge everywhere she needs them, and the GED is easy; Mr. Montoya at school arranges for her to take the test. He already knew within a few weeks of her arrival that there wasn't much she could learn here in High School -- especially this High School -- and he'd been sympathetic, but his advice to her then had been to wait things out until she was of legal age; he'd come up from the gangs, he told her, and no matter how bad things were in her foster home, they could be much worse.

But now they're worse.

Renting a post office box so she'll have a secure address for her mail to come to is harder, though she skims the till at the store to pay for it, because in the eyes of the world she's still a child, though she hasn't really been a child for years. Getting Emancipated Minor Status is hardest of all, because her foster family will have to appear in court before the judge to sign the release papers, though really they aren't her guardians, the State is. They could have released her back to the State when her petition entered the system, and they wouldn't be involved now, but she made sure they never saw the notification of the filing. It had been possible, Ms. Keeler told-her-without-telling-her, that they would have tried to block the petition. New York Court Calendars are crowded, and Family Court judges are hesitant about granting Emancipated Minor petitions to female orphans with no visible means of support (the college applications and supporting documentation are helpful there, but Dani does not trust the System.) The petition could have been refused, delayed. She could have been returned to the State or, worse, left with the Gutierrezes.

So her court date is going to come as a big surprise. Ms. Keeler will be there, though, and that helps.

#

When she tells the Gutierrezes about the court date the night before, producing the notification she'd hidden when it had originally arrived (all the notifications, in fact; she'd been thorough); they say she's an ungrateful _puta_ and that they'll lock her in the cellar of the store so that she can't do something so stupid.

She says they're supposed to meet Ms. Keeler at court at 11:45 tomorrow morning.

They lock her in the cellar.

#

In the middle of the night Julio comes down. He has a bottle of wine and a flashlight with him. He's already a little drunk, something, she knows, of which his father will not approve. The Gutierrezes are very strict with their children.

He's wanted to have sex with her for months. His father wants their _Daniellita_ to be a virgin on her wedding day just as 'God' wants her to be, but even though Julio has told her she looks like a skinny boy, she's blue-eyed and almost blonde, and he figures that she already belongs to him anyway. So far nothing has happened, though. It hasn't been any harder to avoid being alone with Julio than it is to keep herself safe at school (she's still been going, even though, technically, she's graduated, since if she doesn't, it would raise awkward questions here in her placement.) It's been easier, really; Julio only wants what he figures is coming to him anyway, and has taken 'no' for an answer. He means to be a good husband.

But now the ground rules have all changed.

#

She's sitting in the corner. She's found candles and matches, because all the inventory from the store is stored down here, and the cellar is lit up as if it were a church. She's used an entire case of candles; the tall white jar candles that will burn all night.

She hasn't been stupid enough to sleep, either.

She warns him to leave her alone, and then, when he won't, she hits him with a board she's pried loose from one of the packing crates. The bottle he's carrying drops and breaks.

He cries, which surprises her, saying he never wanted to hurt her, that nobody had ever wanted to hurt her. That they only wanted to take care of her, to give her a home. He says she's a witch, _brujera._ That nobody will ever let her out of here; they'll say she's run away; he'll sell her to some men he knows and she'll be sorry.

But he leaves. The basement reeks of sweet cheap wine for the rest of the night. When she starts drinking, in college, she'll automatically avoid the sweet alcoholic drinks that everyone around her favors. Scotch will always be her drink. That and beer. She'll never develop any taste for wine at all.

In the morning the Gutierrezes let her out of the basement in time to keep her court date, but by then she's figured out that they will. Because Ms. Keeler would wonder where she was, and there would be trouble if she didn't show up. And the Gutierrezes hate the thought of losing her money, but they hate the thought of losing what they know they have -- a sure thing -- even more. The City won't let them continue as a foster family if she makes enough trouble -- both she and they believe that. And she will, if they steal her future.

They go to court and at the end of two hours, she's free.

Ms. Keeler comes back to the apartment with Dani so she can collect her possessions. After the Gutierrezes take away everything they say really belongs to them, there aren't many left. They just about fill up a Macy's bag Ms. Keeler finds for her, but at least she still has the pictures of her parents.

She's in legal limbo for six weeks, living in a Halfway House that Ms. Keeler finds for her because there's simply no place else for her to go; she's a kind of displaced person now, like the ones she saw living in camps when she was growing up. But then all the paperwork is done and there are papers at a bank to sign, too. She's real. She has money, identity, independence.

Freedom.

She's been accepted at five colleges, including Harvard, but she can't afford Harvard's fees and UCLA offered her the best deal; a full scholarship and participation in a work/study program besides. Its Linguistics Department is one of the top three in the country; its Anthropology Department is ranked eighth. UCLA is far away from New York and California is warm. She checks Early Arrival on her acceptance form, buys an airplane ticket, and goes.

She won't see New York again for almost eight years.

#

The trip is a horror. Flying didn't used to bother her, but now she's terrified from the moment she gets on the plane. Memories of flying to Chicago to bury her parents, of flying to New York with Nick only to end up trapped as a ward of the State, churn not-quite-grasped beneath the surface of her mind. She fights them down. This time she's flying to freedom.

She'll continue to fly -- it will be necessary for school and the jobs she takes in the future -- but she'll always hate airplanes. She won't really understand why.

#

LAX is huge, but comfortably familiar; she's been in and out of the great airports of the world since before she could walk. She grabs her suitcases (two of them, new, she's had to buy a lot of things in the last couple of weeks) and goes looking for a bus. She can't actually drive (not American cars on paved roads and besides, she has no license), so she can't rent a car, and once she sees the roads and the other drivers, she's just as glad that someone else is driving. The city is huge -- as big as New York, but sprawling -- and smoggy and her allergies flare from the moment she arrives in the airport. She sits in the back of the bus sneezing wildly into wads of Kleenex, gasping and choking for air and still dazed with freedom. Eventually -- it's taken her almost longer than her flight -- she arrives at the campus and begins the process of checking in. It's August, and classes don't start until September, but she has no place else to go.

That's becoming the story of her life, she thinks.

She speaks eleven languages fluently and has a smattering of another five. She can read and write Ancient Phoenician; that's the party trick that got her here. But she's sixteen and doesn't even look that, and that's all the intern manning the Registrar's office during the Summer Term really cares about. The girl keeps telling Dani to go away and come back at the beginning of Fall Registration, when she'll be someone else's problem.

But she speaks another language. Dani can hear it in her voice. Is it Russian? Maybe. Dani was learning Russian once upon a time; she knows quite a bit though she isn't fluent. There were a lot of Russians down in Belize; they'd hang around Nick's campsite bumming coffee and supplies. They weren't soldiers and they weren't mercenaries, and they always petted and teased her, calling her _doushenka._ Nick was always tense when they were around; Dani wasn't sure why and Nick had never explained. And now, of course, he never can.

Dani slams her hand down on the desk. The girl jumps and makes eye contact for the first time.

_< "Sow's farrow! If I wanted to come back next month, I would! I'm here now, and--">_

Her Russian abruptly fails her. "Check your records," she says again, switching back to English. "I'm not a kid. I'm sixteen, I'm enrolling early, and I'm supposed to show up early. My name is Danielle Jackson."

#

The girl finds her record at last and pulls her registration packet -- preliminary course assignments, dorm room, meal tickets, and all the rest of the paperwork.

"You were pretty rude, you know," she says, handing the packet over to Dani.

Dani stares at her blankly, takes the package, and leaves without answering. _Of course I was rude. It was the only way to get you to listen._

Lesson learned: they listen and do what you want if you talk to them in their first language. It's only years later, schooled in a different way by Janet and Sammy and Jack, that she's able to identify this moment for what it was: a friendly overture.

#

She doesn't actually look up again until the following summer.

Her roommate transferred out at the first semester break, leaving Dani with a _de facto_ private room for which she doesn't have to pay the differential. She said Dani was 'weird.' Dani doesn't care. Juliette played loud music, wore perfume that gave Dani headaches, and wanted to turn out the lights and sleep when Dani wanted to study.

Maybe she'll put in for a private room this fall. The extra cost makes her hesitate, but there are so many advantages. Or maybe she just needs to pick the right roommate. It has to be possible, but she's supposed to room with other sophomores, and they're all abysmally stupid.

She's already planning where to do her graduate work. She should have her BA by the end of next year. She only needs a few more credit hours really; the main problem is the scheduling of the classes, and she's talked to the professors about that, but they won't budge. Typical.

She's polished her Russian and is fully fluent now. They speak a lot of different languages on campus. She's up to nineteen now. She already had Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Spanish, Arabic, German, Coptic, Farsi, French, Mayan, Dutch, and English (of course). She's added Russian, Persian, Armenian, Turkish, Swahili, Vietnamese, and Omotik, an obscure sub-Saharan dialect that relates to her theories. She doesn't count Phoenician, which nobody speaks, though she can read it, or Sumerian (ditto), though she's correcting the pronunciation grammar for Sumerian in her spare time and trying to work one out for Phoenician. It's frustrating to have a language you can read and write but can't speak.

Linear A. She'd like to be the one who cracks the code. Linear B is a walk in the park.

Archaeology and Linguistics. She needs both and she can do both Masters at the same time; they require many of the same courses. She's already auditing as many of the Graduate level courses here as she can; she doesn't expect to do her Doctoral programs here, though she may stay for her Masters', so she may as well see what the idiots have to say while she's here. One of the professors has already talked to her about co-authoring a paper; if she actually publishes something while she's an undergrad, that will make her very much in demand when she applies to another school. Her money won't last forever, even if a work/study slot has come with the scholarship she's got -- a good thing, as it's the only way she manages to clothe herself and eat. She hates to touch the trust fund. That's for books and course fees. Not inessentials like food and clothes.

There is so much to learn. And if her professors are idiots -- and most of them aren't all that bright -- there's still a vast library of books and some of the best museums on Earth within a few hours' bus ride.

She really has to learn to drive properly.

Then it's July -- eleven months later -- and she feels as if she's just woken up. It's the eleventh, actually, and she realizes that means it was her birthday a few days ago and she's seventeen now. And she feels...

Better.

Nothing is going to be okay in a world where her parents are dead and nobody actually wants her, but this is better. Better than the two years before college, or the two years before that. Everything since she was twelve, in fact, and Nick dumped her.

(All right. The police took her away from him and he was sick at the time. But he could have gotten her back and he didn't. That's the same as dumping her. And then he left, and a few months later he checked himself into an insane asylum in Oregon rather than come back for her. That's _really_ dumping her.)

But he's in the asylum because the world said he was crazy for believing in space aliens. And in the back of her mind, buried down where she doesn't actually think about it because the way he betrayed her hurts too much, she's convinced that if she can prove he was right, vindicate him, he can leave the asylum. They'll be a family again. All that's left of Mom-Mother-Mommy (at seventeen, she isn't really sure what to call Claire Jackson, even just inside her mind) and the Family Ballard. The only surviving connection of the Jackson Clan. Because Nick's wife is dead, and he never said a word about her beyond that bare fact: _your grandmother is dead, Danielle._ Dani doesn't even know her name. Her mother had no siblings. Her father was an only child as well: late and lone, he would say, making a joke of it. His parents were dead by the time Dani had been born; she knew that much.

She knew it even better later: Nick was her only surviving relative. No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, on either side of her family tree. Just Nick. And Nick didn't want her after all, so she tells herself that she doesn't care about him. Not really.

But now, as if she's awakened from a five years' sleep, the thought has come: everyone mocked him because Nicholas Ballard believes in the aliens that once built structures of unknown purpose on Earth. And she could prove that the aliens exist. Not in the archaeological record -- Nick has tried that and failed -- but in the historical record.

One measures a circle beginning anywhere.

#

It's three years later. She's twenty.

In the last three years she's had several instances of spectacularly unmemorable sex. She's learned to build and use a variety of antique weapons, including the quarterstaff (which is harder to use than it looks.) She's learned to drive and has a driver's license, though she still doesn't own a car.

She's been back to Egypt twice.

She's learned several more languages -- Siwi, Bedawi, Welsh, Polish, Basque, several more dialects of Arabic. Some for research, some for fun.

She has Masters Degrees in Archaeology, Anthropology, Linguistics, and Ancient History by the time she's done -- it wasn't difficult; she doesn't see what people complain about all the time -- and now intends to cap them with matching Doctorates. She's starting with Linguistics. Harvard at last.

Her research has taken her places she never expected to go. It's begun to obsess her.

Nick said there were aliens on Earth. He says he saw them once. He says they spoke Mayan to him.

She now believes they founded the Egyptian civilization. Or _some_ aliens did, because Nick found his in the New World, and the start date for New World civilization is several thousand years later than Old World civilization: about ten thousand years later, to be precise. And she's discovered a start-date for Egyptian civilization thousands of years earlier than conventional Egyptology gives. For that matter, it doesn't evolve. The entire culture just ... appears ... one morning in the Nile Valley, as if somebody unpacked it out of a box.

Or a spaceship.

She knows better than to say so.

Look what happened to Nick.

But the anomalies keep piling up; things that can't be explained by the theories of cultural evolution that she's learning in college, where C follows B follows A in a nice neat line, as inevitable and precise as mathematics or music. Not only in Egypt, but in Greece, China, Crete, Malta, everywhere the archaeological record extends. The evidence for ... something ... is beyond question.

But nobody questions anything at all. She's the only one who questions. It's as if she's the only one who can see these things. An invisible woman viewing invisible data.

#

Nick wasn't an Egyptologist; his field was Mesoamerican cultures. If there was evidence there, it's been laid waste; by conquering heroes, by climate. The archaeological record of the Ancient Near East, though buried by half-a-dozen more millennia, is oddly more forgiving. And filled with maddening clues leading nowhere.

_'Capped in gold...'_

Why would the Egyptians top their Pyramids in gold _before_ they became a solar-focused culture? Everyone says it's to honor Ra, and then they say in the same breath that the earliest Egyptian religious culture was focused on _Mwt,_ Goddess of Night, Sky-Mother and agent of rebirth. Whose cult is -- supposedly -- contemporaneous with the building of the Giza Pyramid.

It makes no sense.

The pyramids were sheathed in limestone, which is gone. Except for the sheathing at the very top. Which retains no evidence of ever having been covered in gold. And if thieves could get up there to steal the gold, they could certainly get up there to steal the limestone, too. Everything has resale value if you're poor enough.

It makes no sense.

She already knows nobody will listen. She makes notes for a paper she suspects she will never write.

#

She loves Boston.

The libraries are fantastic and her fellow students are actually interested in working. Everyone else in the Doctoral Program is years older than she is. She's expected to teach courses as a part of her workload and she's younger than all of her students.

She lives in Cambridge, in a house that's nearly a commune, with a dozen other students. All of them are on the Language/History/Anth track, and study as if the penalty for failure is death. For the first time, she's meeting professors she can't bluff, and it's like falling in love.

The inconsistencies in the historical record, so oddly obvious only to her, are getting harder for her to pretend to ignore. Vyse forged the quarrymen's marks in the Great Pyramid, falsifying its construction date, and everyone still accepts his conclusions as fact. Budge is still relied on in half her classes; his dates are off by centuries and the inferences he makes from his data are usually flat-out wrong. He's still taught.

The experts say that the great Classical and pre-Classical civilizations of the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean evolved from precursor civilizations. In half the cases she's studied -- and Egypt most of all -- she's found no evolution and no precursor cultures. The civilizations simply ... appear.

That isn't possible.

Unless -- oh god, it sounds like madness even in her own mind -- unless these cultures were brought from space and imposed on humans by aliens. So the whole Egyptian civilization, which appears full-blown, so weirdly unlike anything surrounding it, was an ... import.

The Etruscan culture simply vanished. Nobody's ever been quite sure why the Romans obliterated all sign of it so thoroughly, especially since they claimed to revere the Etruscans so greatly. And there are some oddities in the early history of Rome that nobody can satisfactorily explain, especially given that the culture of the Grecian city-states and their possessions is comparatively well-documented at the same period.

It makes no sense.

And it's getting harder every day not to raise these questions among her peers, to her professors. God help her if her Doctoral Committees ever suspect what she's thinking.

#

She makes it through her defenses -- Linguistics and History -- unscathed on the strength of her original work on Ancient Phoenician, revised and expanded, and she can actually speak it now, though she doubts the Phoenicians would understand her. One right after the other, a grueling course that nearly kills her, but the gossip is starting to spread and she has to hurry. She hasn't talked about her theories, but the name 'Dani von Daniken' is becoming attached to her anyway and she has to outrun it. The degrees, she thinks, she hopes, will keep her safe.

When she's awarded her doctorates, Harvard offers her a teaching position, but she refuses; it's nothing more than glorified secretarial work for a professor far-less-qualified than she is. PhDs in hand, she's off to Columbia.

New York looks like a completely different city now.

She's 23.

It's been almost eight years.

The next two PhDs go faster; Archaeology and Anthropology; hand in glove. Eighteen months and some very safe work on the Hyksos Dynasty -- an expansion of her linguistic research -- later, she's done. Safe, but not safe enough. There's more talk.

_'This period of Egyptian history is a chronological nightmare that only additional datable archaeological material can resolve...'_

It makes no sense.

She barely squeaks by the Committees, but Columbia is academically radical, she's already got two Doctorates, and she's published (well, written and co-authored; not everything has been published yet) more than a dozen papers. It's a stunning collection of glittering prizes for somebody who isn't even (quite) twenty-five.

But a PhD -- or two, or four -- doesn't mean she's done. She's barely begun. Her doctoral theses need to be fleshed out, woven together and supported into a book. It's time, now, to start building her future: the Hyksos may yet get her a teaching position, preferably tenure-track. So it's off to the Oriental Institute for her post-doctoral work.

Chicago. Colder than New York. As cold as Netu. Desert cultures have cold hells.

David Jordan and Simon Gardner and Steven Raynor.

Steven is David's research assistant; David is the head of the Department. When she shows up, they're both appalled: David because he wasn't paying attention (typical) and thought he was getting a 'Daniel' instead of a 'Danielle,' Steven because he _was_ paying attention and is sure she's come to take his place. She doesn't want his place, whatever he thinks it is, and manages to convince him.

They become friends, though she never loses the sense she's competing with Steven, and never figures out what they're competing for. The three of them become almost a family: David's only family is a sister in Iowa, and they aren't close. Steven's family is from somewhere back East, and he doesn't like them very much, so she doesn't hear a lot about them. Steven dates. She doesn't. David throws sherry parties, re-creating an Oxford that probably only ever existed in books. She hates sherry. But it's still ... nice.

There's so much work, and she's happier than she's ever been before. And then, the following autumn, Simon Gardner arrives. The newly-minted Dr. Gardner has just finished at Cambridge, where he successfully defended his thesis with the aid (so he says) of many of Dr. Jackson's publications. The opportunity to work with her (he further says) was a major inducement in choosing Chicago for the site of his postdoctoral work.

And for the first time in her life Dani falls in love with something other than books and theories, artifacts and places. For the first time she thinks it may be possible to have a future like the best of her past, like the life her parents had together. Simon is fascinated by her work, and she thinks they could make a good team. She begins to tell him her theories about cultural cross-pollination and single-source origin.

And Simon tells her that while it's all very interesting, it's certainly nothing she could ever contemplate publishing. She'll need to -- _they'll_ need to -- establish themselves. Gain tenure, reputation, respectability. Set aside these unprovable science-fiction notions and build a solid career based on academic fact first. They'll do it together. She has to realize that's the best thing.

And she realizes that no matter what he says now, in Simon's mind there will never come a day when it will be the right time to put forth her theories. He expects her to forget them, set them aside to support an academic establishment that she now knows is completely wrong. Because that would be safe, and conventional, and prudent.

And she realizes she can't do what he wants. She can't choose the safe future; she never could. She has to be free, no matter what it costs.

Honest.

Faithful, if only to herself.

She gives up the future her men -- Simon, David, even Steven -- want for her.

She gives up everything.

She can't bear to live out a lie. Trapped.

#

Back in California. Resigned from the Institute. University of California at Berkeley this time. Teaching assistant. Not such a very bright future for Dr. Jackson after all; the job is one jump up from secretary and miles away from anything that would ever get her tenure.

At least California is still warm. She'd nearly frozen to death in Chicago.

She can't be someone's adjunct-wife. Not even Simon's. She can't play the game of academic lies. She can keep silent -- barely -- but she won't lie. And if she tells the truth -- she knows that, no matter what she said to Simon -- she'll be finished completely in the academic world. Nobody will believe that aliens from outer space came to Earth in Neolithic times and founded Civilization and then vanished without a trace. There are days she doesn't believe it herself, and it's her theory.

What's left? A dead end job. She still hopes for proof -- incontrovertible proof of her theories, proof that will make even the idiots believe because they'll have no choice -- but she's starting to despair of ever finding it.

At least she's got a dog now.

#

But -- as it turns out -- she can't keep silent either. Scotch, the Internet, and years of frustration really don't mix. She posts to a list-serve she's on, denouncing Vyse, the institutionalization of Budge, and cover-ups of Old Kingdom dating anomalies. The message is quickly traced back to her by the college, and her superiors are less than amused. She's about to be dismissed. Kicked out. Fired. Then Catherine Langford comes. Dr. Langford has tracked her here from Chicago. Dr. Langford wants _her._ And once again Dani has nowhere else to go.

#

But that's not quite true. Because Catherine takes her to Colorado and shows her the door to another world, a Stargate that's the proof of all Dani's theories. All Dani has to do to be able to step through it is to figure out how to open it. It's the hardest thing she ever had to do in her life, but she does it.

And she finds a home on the other side, and then a home on this one too.

#

"What were you like when you were a kid?" Jack asks her one day.

They're on a mission. Survey and soil samples. Really boring. It's an idle question, meant to pass the time. He doesn't mean anything by it.

"About like anyone else," she says. "Pretty boring. Went to school a lot. You?"

"Played hockey," he says. "Not so much for school. You probably liked it, though. School."

She shrugs as well as she can with a pack on her back. "Mostly."

###

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to what I eventually decided to call "Across Five Aprils", because I am all meta-recursive like that. The reason for the title (kind of) is that the First Abydos Mission was in April and this series runs through the first five years of the Stargate Program, ending with "A Mirror For Observers". (Also with "Meridian"...)
> 
> Though I go dancing off in all directions entirely too often, my headcanon is that *this* series is the "canon". You see, "A Mirror For Observers" takes the premise that somewhere, Daniel Jackson was born female, but in every other possible particular, her life remained the same as his. So then, naturally, I wondered what the fandom for the TV Series would be like if it was Danielle and not Daniel. And then I set out to re-create all the various types of story there might be in that fandom. Which explains much about my work, if not about me.
> 
> This particular story takes off from hints in "A Mirror For Observers", which, while not quite automatic writing, definitely involved a lot of having my subconscious for a co-author, leadint to a lot of stuff that was consistent and considered, but not by me while I was awake.
> 
> It was written for K_Kijo, who wanted "dismal orphan fic", which this certainly qualifies as.
> 
> Wherever you are, Kijo, I miss you.


End file.
